About Me

Sunday, March 6, 2016

THE MARK IN AMERICA #2, PAGE 3

THE MARK IN AMERICA, ISSUE
#2, PAGE 3

As I’ve mentioned in
previous posts, Mike Barr, the series writer, and I were working “Marvel
Style”, starting with this issue. (“Marvel Style” is a method of collaboration
between the writer and penciller innovated by Stan Lee in the mid-60’s where he
would give the artist a plot outline, allowing the artist to break the story
down in terms of the number of panels per page, and what would happen in each
panel. Stan would write the dialogue and captions based off the artist’s layout,
sometimes demanding changes in the pencils before sending them to the inker;
sometimes he would demand changes in the ink stage, which is why one can find
glaring and obtrusive panels obviously drawn by John Romita Sr. or Marie
Severin in the middle of other artists stories.) Especially on this page;
Mike’s outlined the events of the page, implying that it should play out in six
panels. I, on the other hand, was going through a “long take” phase, having
recently seen “Rope” and “Under Capricorn” directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and
that affected my layouts in several places in this mini-series which I’ll point
out along the way.

You can see it here in panel three, where four action beats
are combined into one panel, organized by the direction of the reader’s “eye
read”, left to right, up to down. I was and am quite proud of this; I think the
whole page flows remarkably well.

My other key influence on
this page was Alex Toth, specifically his story, “Eternal Hour” from “Witching
Hour” #1. During my summer vacation in 1986, I had copied this story in my
sketchbook to study Toth’s spotting of blacks and had my mind blown by this
panel. You see, I had been working professionally as a TV animation storyboard
artist for 3 years by this point, and had been trained to see comics in a
storyboard sense, i.e., each panel was a single moment or action. This panel is
basically 3 moments, organized by eye-read, left to right, and, most
importantly in this case, up to down. My youthful mind was blown, new vistas
opened up in an instant. I can only compare it to the climax of “The Miracle
Worker”, when Helen Keller finally figures out that all those weird hand
gestures Anne Sullivan has been making means “Water”.

During one of my phone chats
with Toth during 1993 (when I was drawing “The Mark”, I asked him about this
specific panel; he had no specific memory of it, wouldn’t even tell me if he
wrote it, or, if not, how much lee way he had with the script.

I also recall it was during
this period that “The Death of Superman” was published, and how much it was loathed
by my crowd, including Toth, who railed against it. My response was ambivalent.
I could see it as a valid artistic challenge (tell an entire story just using
splash pages); in fact this challenge is implicit in the revelation of “The
Panel”: Could a gifted and foolhardily ambitious cartoonist tell an entire
story this way? Of course, Dan Jurgens had never been able to story-tell his
way out of a paper bag, so, of course, “The Death of Superman” was a God Awful
Mess. Still, one had to give Jurgens points for hubris.